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Constantin Brancusi

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) is acknowledged as the outstanding early 20th century sculptor and one of the most orginal artists working in Paris at a time of remarkable creativity.  He was a supreme craftsman, producing carvings and bronzes of extreme refinement.  The essential forms that he discovered in his works shifted towards abstraction whilst always retaining their root in reality.  The results were sculptures of limpid beauty, balancing form, material and potentially mystical content.  He came from a remote rural environment deep in the Carpathian mountains.  Like Picasso, Brancusi learned from African, prehistoric and Romanesque sculpture ; Brancusi brilliantly updated their powerful forms with his refined surfaces and Art Deco suaveness. Sitting on their limestone and marble pedestals, his compact forms operate in the gap between Stone Age and space age.  He was an advocate of direct carving, the practice of producing sculpture (particularly stone sculpture) by cutting directly into the material, as opposed to having it reproduced from a plaster model using mechanical aids and assistants. In this he was at one with Andre Derain and Eric Gill .  He influenced Amedeo Modigliani, who he met in 1909, to take up stone carving and was an important influence on the later British sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.


 

Brancusi, The kiss, 1907-8


Brancusi, Torso, 1912


Brancusi, Torso of young girl, 1922

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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